Article March 17, 1997 Issue

Living streams of mercy

by Kim Shippey

Last month, seven and a half thousand people from eight hundred churches representing eighty different denominations gathered at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston for the thirty-seventh annual congress of the Evangelistic Association of New England. They came from more than twenty-five states to hear addresses given by eleven nationally recognized speakers, and to participate in more than sixty workshops on such subjects as lasting marriage, bringing up children, overcoming fear, sound investment, the role of women in a changing world, ministering to athletes, and ways of becoming better husbands and fathers.

As a precede to several of the plenary sessions, Broadway actor Bruce Kuhn, whom we have interviewed in these columns, recited passages from the Scriptures relating to the keynote speeches that would follow.

In his opening remarks, Association President Stephen A. Macchia emphasized that prayer should not just punctuate people's experience but permeate it. "This is our most important activity as men and women of God," he said. He reminded his audience that the theme of the conference derived from two lines of a hymn by John Wyeth, "Streams of mercy, never ceasing,/Call for songs of loudest praise." He said that the purpose of the two-and-a-half-day gathering was to challenge those present to be streams of mercy—in their churches, in their families, in their communities, and in their workplaces.

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